Art Department

This thesis investigates the paradoxical nature of the system of the grid and language as forms of control throughout art history. In both cases, this thesis takes a multifaceted approach. It explores the various iterations and significances of the grid, tracing and linking it back to Caspar Friedrich’s treatment of the landscape, through to its abstract significance in the hands of modernist artist Piet Mondrian and its post-modern resurgence in the works of Mona Hatoum. This investigation reveals the grid as a dissociative and dehumanizing system, themes I employ in my own work, Remote Control, which links the grid to remote targeting technologies, focusing on the virtual dominance drone strikes in the current state of the world. This thesis considers language in a similar format, tracing its evocative power back to a literary work at the root of Western civilization in the Ancient Greek poet Homer’s Iliad. It turns the metaphoric and estranging ability of Homeric language to the subject of language itself in Jasper Johns’ treatment of the alphabet, exploring how the American artist both underlines and unsettles the linguistic system. And finally, it returns to Mona Hatoum to explore language as both a connective and restrictive force. In my own work Seven Flags, I reconstruct these notions of language and their implications in governmental law. Overall, these works examine the structures inherent in the grid and language, both questioning and recognizing their influence on our world.

In the following thesis, I argue that radical intimacy is an embodied trust which dismantles disempowering hierarchies of power and privilege, and can be facilitated through the heightened spaces of art and food. In the first chapter, I argue that the mediums of performance and installation art are particularly well-suited to the goals of radical intimacy, and that these potentialities are not properly addressed in the existing academic canons surrounding either medium. Then, I consider how these mediums have been employed in the critical exploration of gender, race, and queerness. In the second chapter, I argue that food is a material metaphor for human vulnerability and inter-connection. Then, I consider how both self-identified artists and self-identified chefs employ food in creating radical intimacy. In the third chapter, I recount my thesis work, HOME, an installation in which I held a series of dinner-performances. Through a thorough investigation of the interplay between food, labor, and the sacred, I ultimately argue that HOME is an example of radical intimacy at work.

This thesis is a 52 page YA graphic history of the Columbia River and its dams, titled

Up the Columbia!. It is accompanied by the following written product, which explains the motivations, inspirations, and processes behind the creation of said book.

Preface

I am exploring the form and body of the Centaur and its relation to contemporary beliefs surrounding, as well as ways in which we encounter and understand, what can be viewed as hybridized bodies. This work to be installed in Elliot Circle, of Reed College and will also stand as a critique of both the Commemorative Equestrian statue, as well as general privatized access, institutionalization and hereforto denial of certain identities and histories within.

Abstract

My Studio Art Thesis consists of a twenty-foot Centaur installed Elliot Circle. The main body of the Centaur was constructed out of welded steel, the upper body is resin cast elements of my own body. This thesis paper introduces the problem of the Centaur and follows with a series of questions in the form of an interview, I asked myself about the public sculpture, my body in the world, and my method of making art.

Accessibility is a necessary and subversive artistic approach when addressing contemporary surveillance in the United States. In the first chapter, I outline the ways in which surveillance has been intentionally mystified and obfuscated by its practitioners within the last twenty years; further, I demonstrate how this abstraction has been weaponized against the general public. In the second chapter, I examine the way surveillance is presented within the contemporary art canon, touching upon artwork that I feel succeeds at representing surveillance in a responsible and cognizant manner. This is done in two sections: military language and subversive ceramics. From this, I build a framework for artistic responsibility when addressing surveillance and related topics. In my third chapter, I describe and contextualize the works I made for this project, and indicate the ways in which I adhere to the framework I presented.

My performance-based Studio Art thesis studies the relationships between bodies, queerness and perception. My work consists of two distinct, but related, immersive performance/installations of wearable, sculptural body-like objects. The performances of these constructed bodies explore the relationship between phenomenological queerness and identity-based queerness in addition to the relationships between bodies in space, bodies and objects, and performer and audience. This thesis draws upon Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of queer phenomenology and Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque body in order to think through the process of orientation for queer, perceiving bodies. My thesis work draws influence from three overlapping ways of working: artists concerned with queer materiality such as Hamony Hammond and Nick Cave, performance artists such as Leigh Bowery, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović, and installation artists such as Ann Hamilton and Yayoi Kusama. My studio thesis work pulls together the threads of theory, artistic influence and my own personal experiences of queerness to construct bodies and performances that question what is familiar, expected and normal

Contemporary scholarship in gender often depicts trans people and examines their identity in a highly politicized way. Queer theory itself seems to consist of a plethora of confrontational declaratives: I will not agree to be tolerated. Similarly, depictions of queerness in art are also often very confrontational. Being transgender has a history of being treated by artists as an experiment in gender and performance, or as a political statement simply in the act of being. This can manifest in sexualization and sensationalism. But what if such ‘dangerous experiments’ did not have to be so forceful in order for an audience to consider them acceptable in life? My interest lies in the creation of beautiful, gentle images that do not do violence to the people depicted. It is my goal to focus not on the differences between bodies, mine and those of a cisgender audience, but on the depth and breadth of experience and personhood of the individual. I aim to explore the dimensionality and depth of experiences and construction of identity, both positive and negative, in an age in which we are finally beginning to see preliminary positive transgender representation. Although this thesis began as a nearly-anthropological catalogue of other transgender people’s experiences in the social construction of identity, I realized midway through that what I really wanted to explore was my own relationship to my body, my transgender identity, my gender, and my own place in the world both as a person and as an artist. Through extensive research, I found that nuanced and intimate depictions of transgender lives were few and far between, and so set out to create my own visual vocabulary for the exploration of complex transgender identity. In the end, I completed a series of nine portraits which explored a variety of aspects of myself, from anxiety to empowerment. My work will add to a budding canon that portrays transgender individuals not as objects of pity, but as complicated, fleshed-out people in every aspect.

The following thesis examines how the triptych is a part of religious and spiritual art making.  The first chapter covers the history of the triptych within the Catholic Church as well as the way in which this format has been repurposed by abstract expressionists in the early twentieth century and contemporary artists today.  In each use -- Catholicism, abstract expressionism, and contemporary art -- I ask what kind of spirituality or religion these separate triptychs offer.  In my second chapter I answer the question of the origin of my own spirituality through three vignettes.  Finally, I look at Altarpiece, the work I created this year, to see how the work fits into the trajectory of use discussed in the first chapter as well the triad of vignettes a part of the second chapter.

This project is an interactive piece that stages an investigation into the ways in which the Internet shapes and structures life. Specifically, it examines phenomena such as privacy and advertising, usage and utility and the costs of these things for individuals and society. While many people are already aware of these issues, they are hard to address given that the Internet has been completely integrated with day-to-day life in America and many other nations. This project stages a collaborative aesthetic experience around the ways in which we as individuals approach online communication in order to emphasize these issues and perhaps generate new ways of using the Internet that can challenge these issues. It does so with a virtual library, the contents of which are generated by the participants. The aggregate activity of the participants will determine the reading, message, and success of this piece.

West Canon Arcade critiques masculine stereotypes via the co-option of Western canon art and literature, examining toxic attitudes inherit to hegemonic patriarchy through two video pieces displayed as large-scale video projections. West Canon Arcade critiques Western culture which supports both toxic masculinity and American imperialism as two halves of hegemonic patriarchy.

This thesis is a photographic and sculptural exploration of cycles of change and healing. The exhibition consists of five 18 x 46 inch silk prints suspended from a metal hoop. In addition to an introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into three main sections. The sections include: explanations of my artwork, influences, and artist statement integrated together. The first section, Memento Mori: The Vanitas, explains my influences from Dutch still life painting, and touches on themes of death. The second section, Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama: Working with Trauma and Mental Illness, discusses how Bourgeois and Kusama used art making to understand and work through trauma and mental illness. The third section, Cycles, Change, and the Future, describes the work, its symbolism, and the connection to witchcraft and tarot.